1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for managing flow information between a base station and a mobile station in a communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a communication system, in order to support various services, an advanced base station, or simply a Base Station (BS), manages a plurality of flows for each Mobile Station (MS). For example, when a certain MS desires simultaneously both voice communication and data services, such as the Internet, a BS allocates two flows respectively providing the voice communication and the Internet to the MS. A Quality of Service (QoS) for voice communication, such as a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) QoS is allocated to one flow, while a different QoS for the Internet, such as a Best Effort (BE) QoS, is allocated to the other flow. In this case, each of the two flows includes a plurality of parameters according to the required QoS. The VoIP QoS has particular requirements with respect to delay. Therefore, parameters, such as uplink allocation period and uplink allocation size, are determined in the VoIP QoS. In contrast, since the BE QoS does not have particular requirements, the BE QoS does not include particular parameters. In the following description, parameters of each flow are called “flow information”.
Flow information of each flow is dynamically managed by each of the MS and the BS. That is, new flow information may be added to a corresponding flow, parameters included in existing flow information of a corresponding flow may be changed, or the flow information of a corresponding flow may be deleted. The operation for an addition/change/deletion of the flow information, as described above frequently, occurs even while the MS is performing a communication within a service area of a serving BS.
Furthermore, even when the MS performs a handover from the serving BS to a target BS, the operation for the addition/change/deletion of the flow information occurs. In this case, if the addition/change/deletion of the flow information occurs while the MS performs a handover to a target BS, the flow information obtained as a result of the addition/change/deletion of the flow information may not be the same between the MS and the target BS. Consequently, communication between the MS and the target BS may be difficult or occur incorrectly.